Flint Group Printing Plates for Amcor’s Tobacco Packaging Products

With about 35,000 employees and a turnover of 12.4 billion AUD (ca. 10 billion Euro), Amcor is the world’s largest packaging company. Headquartered in Melbourne, Australia, the company serves customers from more than 300 sites in 43 countries worldwide. They market a broad range of packaging related products and services, such as packaging for beverages, food, healthcare, personal and homecare, industrial applications, and tobacco.

To further improve efficiency of the order processing, Amcor decided to install the latest generation of H.C. Moog’s sheetfed gravure press, 1-TBR Compact, in their Rickenbach tobacco packaging site in Switzerland. The 1-TBR Compact printing press can be utilised for printing, varnishing, debossing or calendaring. Since the installation in December 2011, Flint Group Flexographic Products’ nyloprint WSA 52 Digital photopolymer printing plates have been used in addition to metal cylinders for sheetfed gravure printing. Main applications are test samples, prototypes and jobs with short print runs. The combination of 1-TBR Compact and nyloprint WSA 52 Digital plates improve the flexibility and the speed to market of Amcor’s high quality tobacco packaging products.

With more than half a year of experience, Amcor is very satisfied with the set-up, as the printing results are very close to the production quality of multi colour inline gravure presses. The main advantages of nyloprint photopolymer plates are the ease and speed of plate processing, even at a very high image resolution. Print results demonstrate excellent solid ink density due to brilliant ink transfer, metallic-gloss and brightness of metallic inks. Simply put, the plates are cost-efficient, whilst meeting the highest quality demands.

Whether the production of premium packaging for pharmaceutical products, spirits, food, cosmetics and tobacco or the use in security and label printing - the sheetfed gravure process covers a wide range of applications. Due to its suitability in printing and finishing of paper as well as board substrates, the nyloprint WSA digital plate is remarkably the ideal plate choice in meeting complex printing challenges.